CONTENTS OF VOLUME XIV SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE THE GREAT REJECTED BOOKS OF THE BIBLICAL APOCRYPHA INTRODUCTION THE CHIEF WRITINGS WHICH HAVE SOUGHT AND BEEN DENIED ADMISSION TO THE BIBLE THE HE books included in the present volume are those which, loosely speaking, we call "The Apocrypha." They have a strange and piercing interest of their own. They are very old; most of them are very noble of sentiment and high of purpose; yet for one reason or another they have been rightly rejected from the Holy Scriptures into which they sought admission. The origin of most of them is doubtful. Even the language in which they were originally written is uncertain. We can not group them definitely as Hebraic or even as Semitic. Some may have Greek sources, and thus spring from the thought of the great Aryan races, rather than from the teaching of the Semites. All of them have Aryan touches added to their earlier ideas, and difficult to disentangle. Hence our volume, while mainly founded on Hebraic literature, drifts far from it, and the books here given show more of the Western world, the European spirit, than any other early literature of the East. The fact that these books have been denied a place in our Scriptures has gradually weighed down even the meaning |